Anand LaShimpi of Anandtech released an article on Intel SSD longevity a few days ago. A few of my friends were talking about it, so of course my boss asked me for numbers on our SSD longevity. First off, Anand is somewhat over-complicating things by trying to determine drive lifetime by how much data he's written so far. It's an admirable attempt, but it involves too much hedging and guessing. Managers and finance departments intensely dislike guessing. So what's a guy to use instead?

If you're working at a company that tries to save money by running LVS instead of dedicated load balancer appliances, you need to fetch your own monitoring data. No easy MIBs to read. The main LVS page basically says "use scripts" or "write a program using our library" which is fine and all. But there are a lot of people who need this stuff fast. So here it is. Here's how to grab the current input rate counters from LVS:

That command will spit out connections per second, packets in per second, and bytes in per second. The output stats are mostly useless if you run in direct return mode (as I assume most are). If you really need them:

We run this every minute through a cron entry and pipe the output to a file. The file is read via HTTP through a dedicated nginx instance that handles all of our internal profiling/stats data. OpenNMS does a regex match on it and then graphs the data. Done and done. The command will return errors if LVS isn't running, so you might want to make sure it's actually running.

Good to see that FedEx will allow collisions on tracking numbers. One would think to use that as a primary key. Nope! Not FedEx! The phone call with the support rep was similarly hilarious. After assuring me that information I saw on my screen was wrong, my boss pointed out "well it's a good thing to know that they're using two systems here..."

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A NOLA native just trying to get by. I live in San Francisco and work as a digital plumber for the joint that runs this thing. (Square/Weebly) Thoughts are mine, not my company's.